Leadership

Liberal Senator David Bushby was probably the last person in the room to comprehend what he was doing yesterday when he 'meowed' at Penny Wong in Parliament. He was doing what power always does when it is threatened… bites back. But yesterday’s events were also testament to Australia’s poor progress on men and women sharing power.

Malcolm Turnbull’s decision at the end of 2011 to form his own party, the Republic Australia Party (RAP), had paid dividends way beyond the expectations of a cynical media and the desperately frightened leadership of the two old parties. Voters from all points of the political compass rallied to the new party, desperate for a way to break out of the dead-end that Australian politics and media discussion had become.

The compelling narrative emerging from the Canberra Press Gallery is that Labor is dead, Gillard is a dud leader and the whole show should put itself out of its misery and hand power to the Coalition. Yet if you judge national debate on the numbers, not the analysis, there is a very different story.

The Fatah-Hamas agreement is nothing more than a terror pact against Israel. How can Israel be expected to make peace with an enemy that denies even its very right to exist and is committed to the elimination of the Jewish state?

I don't like to see public figures giving public interviews in which they crow about getting their boys to knock off the bad guy. Is this what we know now as a public moral? When is it okay to kill someone, and when is it okay to crow about it?

For all the trash talk over Barry O'Farrell's win it is for voters to decide how Liberals fair on social policy. If he gets it right, O'Farrell has the chance to change the political landscape of New South Wales for the next generation.

Chants of “ditch the witch” and “ditch the bitch” could be heard repeatedly at the protest rally against the carbon tax in Canberra yesterday. It was a fitting illustration of the escalating vitriol against Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

If the polls are to be believed both major parties are now led by people we find increasingly distasteful, so much so that we would far rather return to their predecessors – the men dumped by their respective factional bosses.